No Vibe Shift on Netflix Yet

The new cultural products of May 2025 still reflect the eternal verities of May 2020 as bequeathed to us by St. George Floyd.

It’s widely said that the public now finds the wokeness and the Racial Reckoning of the last dozen years to be cringe. Hence, the Democratic Party-aligned hard news front sections of newspapers seem to be trying to memoryhole their former obsessions.

But when reading the arts and entertainment pages in the back of the New York Times announcing new museum exhibits, new themes for the Met Gala, new Pulitzer Prizes, and new Netflix shows, nothing seems to have changed. For example, from the New York Times today:

‘Forever’ Explores the Timelessness of Teen Romance (and Sex)

A new Netflix series adapts Judy Blume’s 1970s novel with a contemporary Black cast, flipping the gender roles but preserving its emotional innocence.

By Melena Ryzik

May 8, 2025

In Judy Blume’s taboo-busting 1975 novel “Forever …,” a teenage girl has sex for the first time. It does not destroy her life. (That’s the plot twist.) But she is still surrounded by cautionary tales: unwanted pregnancies, untimely marriages and dreams deferred. The stakes of any tryst are higher for her than they are for her more experienced high school boyfriend.

When the showrunner Mara Brock Akil considered adapting the novel, a young adult classic, she saw the relationship through different eyes: her own, as a mother to Black sons. In her first meeting with Blume — whose seminal coming-of-age best-sellers helped generations understand their bodies and themselves — she made the case that a TV version should also be told from the perspective of the boyfriend, in a contemporary series focused on Black families. …

Could boys get pregnant during the Great Awokening? I can’t remember what you were supposed to believe on that question, but I’m sure the appropriate answer was all very nuanced.

If Katherine, the book’s heroine, seemed socially powerless in her era, “I would posit that Black boys are the most vulnerable at this time,” …

The show is set in Los Angeles in 2018, “between Trayvon Martin’s murder and George Floyd,” Brock Akil said in a recent interview, when Black families like hers “felt like we were alone and screaming in a vacuum — a very scary time.”

“We didn’t have the language that we have now,” she added, about “how we were parenting to get our children safe to their futures.”

Much of this obsoleteness is of course due to inertia. When executives greenlighted these projects, how were they supposed to know how embarrassing they’d soon sound? What? Were they getting paid a lot of money to anticipate what audiences would want? How could any entertainment executive have intuited that just because the Woke trend was obviously moronic and driven by repulsive racist hate that it wouldn’t rule the hearts and minds of the world forever, but instead that folks would get tired of it, to the extent that they ever much liked it at all?

What’s more bizarre, though, is that critics writing on deadline in May 2025 never seem to notice how the latest cultural products they are reviewing are so dated and obsolete.

To them, it will always be late May 2020 forever.